It feels like the world is folding up around me, like origami paper, and I’m trapped inside of its breathless center.

Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness...

I focused on the passing houses filled with couples who’d somehow survived this teenage craziness of ‘he likes her but she likes him and he likes somebody else, you just can’t win.’ How did they...

6. Sleep with a bra on every night in fear of your boobs dropping should you forget. Intermediate: Don’t wear a bra in the daytime. Advanced: Forget bras and wear the Hear Comes Trouble T-shirt...

When we became teenagers boredom grew like a moth in a cocoon fighting to escape, and the peace created by our parents became a prison. We sought excitement and adventure. We sought anything but the...

I wanted her and only her.I wanted to be a part of her storm. I wanted to feel my pulse against hers.I wanted the bitter on her sweet tongue. I wanted the sadness in her...

She logged in and read a few of her old posts, smiling at the issues she had raged about and shaking her head at how some of the rants now seemed pretentious and judgmental. She...

Scott: I don’t think I’m ready to be a grown-up.Kim: I don’t think you are either, buddy. But hey, you’ll get it. It just takes practice.

I had a lot of growing up to do. A lot of times, I learned the hard way.

Because I was conceived and born and I grew up. I’m breathing and my heart is beating and as much as it hurts ― as much searing, monumental pain it causes me ― I have...

But I can’t manage to grow up and change shape. I’m still tiny, and staying that way, perhaps because I know the secret that everyone pretends to be unaware of, perhaps because I know that...

I wanted to say all these things about how you just have to hold on to the things you love and let go of all the rest.

And you might try to hide or protect yourself, or compare the different states of love,but you must not grow up, must not act wise when it comes to love.You must stay foolish and fall...

In this league, it’s about growing up, … That’s one of the areas I’ve got to grow up in. . . . Everyone knows I can score. Everyone knows I can do all these great...

Growing up I didn’t know any other way.

My existence is young like the blossoming leaves. I have experienced nothing yet.

it feels so scary getting old.

There are only two things that determine whether you’re old enough to do something — whether you understand what the hell you’re getting yourself into — and whether you’re willing to accept responsibility for it...

Part of me is afraid that everyone will laugh, that I’m a caricature of myself.

Some days you go bear hunting and you get eaten. Some days you come home with a nice rug to roll around on, and bear steaks. What they don’t tell you as a kid is...

He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter’s eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose...

Please… Whoever you are, whatever you are… I believe in you even though I don’t completely understand you. I feel you around me even though I can’t exactly describe what I’m feeling. Sometimes things happen...

Your passions don’t have to connect to one another and no one needs to sign off on them. Passion isn’t logical… it’s only the fuel which keeps our souls alive. Let it be that simple.

He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.

Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime; time takes time. The only way to fail at life is...

There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.

Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposedlimitations.

Well Sarah’s on drugs again and that’s why she did it in Mario’s backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid’s been cutting himself again so he was sent away...

When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world...

Maybe universal nostalgia doesn’t exist. Maybe each of us carries our own personal version of the better times. It’s at about twnety-two years that we all begin to think of our childhood as the good...

You become a man when, in having children, you not only physically look after and protect them but also protect them with all the love and learning you have to give.

Beyond the boundaries of herself, her parents and the enclosing garden walls, were open fields and other waiting places she still knew nothing of – lies of the land, perhaps. What Katie did know is...

Manhood had come to him, both in character and demeanour, not as it comes to most young lads, an eagerly-desired and presumptuously-asserted claim, but as a rightful inheritance, to be received humbly, and worn simply...

I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with...

A child isn’t born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let’s just say that when I realized that I didn’t want to grow up, the...

I had a dream about you. I watched you grow up, and though I enjoyed the whole process, it did get pretty uncomfortable sitting in the tree holding those binoculars all those years.

Plans never go as planned, ever; that’s just how life is. People spend way too much time dreaming about a future they should be having more nightmares warning them against. But that doesn’t mean you...

We teach what we need to learn. And we teach it until we get it.

Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.

That was his mother. When she wasn’t crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

Don’t try to make me grow up before my time…

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I’ve decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

But I think I’m broken too. I just don’t know it yet.

Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back. I’m going to help you forgive the things that you won’t let yourself forget.

You haunt my days and dreams.

I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always...

Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?””If you take care of it.””What do you have to do?””Lot’s of things. You’ve been watching me.””Will you show me all of them?””Sure.””Is it hard?””Not if...

He was still a kid inside. His body had grown, stretched, towered, tanned its skin, hardened its muscle, darkened its tawny shock of long hair, tightened its lines around jaw and eyes, thickened fingers and...

Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work.

Being a child sucked. Being a teenager was worse. And being an adult seemed so far away that I had a better chance at swimming the length of the ocean than growing up.